After some of my previous posts, this seems like a good time to support this point, which someone on twitter put very succinctly:
Trying to find truth is sometimes an overwhelming and paralyzing endeavor that makes we wonder if I’m right about anything at all. Finding conclusive answers is so time-consuming and difficult! But uncertainty is also not an excuse to throw our hands up and say, “I don’t know!” as a response to every issue. I think I remember reading something from Lesswrong about how as Bayesians, we should always have a ranking belief, even if we have extremely low confidence in it. Maybe I’m thinking of this post: The Fallacy of Gray
The Sophisticate: “The world isn’t black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It’s all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else.”
The Zetet: “Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view . . .”
—Marc Stiegler, David’s Sling
Just because everything is uncertain, doesn’t mean that everything is equally uncertain. We must avoid being overconfident, but we must also avoid saying “I don’t know!” to every question. It’s not productive or wise to be agnostic about every topic, just because you don’t have all the facts.
Vincit Veritas 